Tag Archives: western civilization

What Should a Scholar Do When Civilization Topples?

Clive James’s book of essays called Cultural Amnesia offers a take on a German medieval scholar who wrote influentially on literature and Western civilization. As the Nazi party began to gain power, Ernst Robert Curtius warned of danger to come, but when it did come, Curtius retreated into his scholarly study and said no more. He didn’t directly support the Nazis, but with his silence, one has to wonder where his loyalties settled.

James says many German and French intellectuals prior to WWII wanted to believe they could forge wonderful, cultural bonds high above the dirty politics of their day. He calls this a “wishful, wistful thought.”

Most of our wishful thinking is about what we love. . . . But if we are to learn anything from catastrophe, it is wise to remember what some of the men who shared our passions once forgot. Curtius forgot that continuity is not in itself an inspiration for culture, merely a description of it.

Curtius thought he was doing his humble part to preserve civilization, and it wasn’t worthless work, but the hard chore of cultural preservation was being accomplished by the men in bombers, parachutes, and fatigues. It wasn’t the time to discern the patterns of principles in the past; it was the time to fight for the morals they already had.

Curtius the universal scholar is left looking depressingly restricted, and humanism is left with its besetting weakness on display—the temptation it carries within it to reduce the real world to a fantasy even while presuming to comprehend everything that the world creates.

Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, p. 159

It’s been another week, hasn’t it? Here are some links to consider.

Legacy Press: Are there any good journalists working for the biggest names in news? “These seven failures from the past few weeks should dispel any benefit of the doubt you have left for the corporate media’s honesty.

Russia: A new book exposes a movement I wish American opinionmakers understood. “Russia is systematically and deliberately instilling in its children hatred, vengefulness, and the desire to kill.

Poetry: William Cowper said, “Despair made amusements necessary, and I found poetry the most agreeable amusement.”

Dostoevsky: John Stamps praises the Michael R. Katz translation of The Brothers Karamazov, calling it thrilling and lively. Katz doesn’t attempt a literal translation but adapts the work to English ears by simplifying the naming convention, cutting back some repetition, and using footnotes instead of endnotes.

Woodlands: Two forest lovers, ages 10 and 8, “have hiked every trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park”—900 miles of hiking.

Photo by David Hawkes on Unsplash

‘The Hyperions’ Movie, And Can We Just All Get Along?

We watched a new superhero comedy/drama called “The Hyperions” over the holiday. It’s the story of a super-enabled family that has broken up, because though they talk about being family, they have been managed more like a business team. Two of the original team members are young adults now, and they want their powers back.

The trailer leaves the impression the movie is pretty darn funny, but it doesn’t quite bring the laughs. It’s funny, just not that funny. Instead it leans into Vista Mandulbaum’s anger against her inventor/showman father, Professor Ruckus Mandulbaum, who seems to have wounded her and damaged the whole team only after she rebels and leaves. That makes this more a feel-good family drama with superhero comedy thrown in.

Cary Elwes carries the story as the absent-minded, perpetually frumpy Professor Mandulbaum. Penelope Mitchell Vista, the first of the Hyperions, conveys most of the story’s emotional weight, and everyone else is fine.

I chaffed most when the characters couldn’t talk honestly with each because of issues. One of my daughters thought the story could have shown us happy family moments in order to help us care about their pain more. Most of the violence is muted and sometimes light-hearted. It’s not really a superhero story. It’s a family-business story about superheros, and overall I enjoyed it.

What else to do we have?

Western Civilization: Susannah Black Roberts responds to an argument in Stephen Wolfe’s book on Christian Nationalism. He says no one seeks the well-being of everyone around; he only seeks that for himself and his own kind. The idea that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness applies to all mankind is not sound. We only seek that for those in our own ethnicity. To support this thesis, Roberts writes, Wolfe cherry picks from a wide range of author in the western tradition. And then she quotes Chesterton.

Once England: Here’s a photo of a map of England showing the monasteries dissolved by King Henry VIII.

Streaming TV: Ted Kluck says The Handmaid’s Tale could be good hate-watching, if you like shows on the preachy-preachy side.

Thomas Jefferson: World News Group’s book of the year is Thomas Kidd’s Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh. “In this biography, Kidd shows us an original thinker attempting to cobble together his own brand of spirituality. Jefferson held unorthodox views long before he wrote the Declaration of Independence, but he wasn’t a Deist who saw God as an uninvolved Creator. He believed in God’s providence, but he saw that providence at work in America’s founding rather than in the saving of souls or the creation of the Church.”

First Thanksgiving in Virginia, Elite Evangelicalism, and Everything Decays

Phil Wade

I hope everyone here, there, and elsewhere has had a happy Thanksgiving. I realize this is an American holiday, but it’s just one more way you should allow America into your hearts and lives for your own and your country’s flourishing. I’m talking to you, United Kingdom. You never should have let all the good people leave your empire, you sick tyrant.

Okay, what else have we got?

First Thanksgiving: “After a rough two-and-a-half months on the Atlantic, [the Margaret, a 35-foot-long ship with 36 settlers and crew] entered the Chesapeake Bay on November 28, 1619. It took another week to navigate the stormy bay, but they arrived at their destination, Berkeley Hundred, later called Berkeley Plantation, on December 4. They disembarked and prayed.”

Ben Franklin: In a new biography, D. G. Hart presents Benjamin Franklin as an example of a “spiritual, but not religious” American Protestantism. “As much of a cliché as pulling himself-up-by-his-bootstraps is, his wit and striving say as much about Protestantism as it does about American character.”

Cultural Elites: Carl Trueman is thankful for David French‘s articles supporting the Respect for Marriage Act. “Elite evangelicalism is clearly making its peace with the sexual revolution and those of us who will not follow suit are destined for the margins.”

The Ends of History: Michael Bonner has written a defense of civilization. “All this is to say that the ‘whole new world’ we were promised in the 90s is much like the old one, only worse. The theory of irreversible progress seems increasingly implausible. It seems that anyone of any walk of life or partisan stripe could agree with Livy that ‘we can bear neither our vices nor their remedies’.”

Education: Can Christian Higher Education Stay the Course? “I could rattle off a litany of universities that remain under the auspices of Mainline Protestant denominations but where an effort to think Christianly beyond the bounds of theology is foreign to its educational mission and has been for a long time.”

Is There a Homogeneous ‘West’?

In 1958, humor rag Punch published an essay by C.S. Lewis called “Revival or Decay?” in which Lewis criticized broad-brush assessments of his day–the same assessments people still make. Here’s his closing paragraph.

Is there a homogeneous ‘West’? I doubt it. Everything that can go on is going on all round us. Religions buzz about us like bees. A serious sex worship–quite different from the cherry lechery endemic in our species–is one of them. Traces of embryonic religions occur in science-fiction. Meanwhile, as always, the Christian way too is followed. But nowadays, when it is not followed, it need not be feigned. That fact covers a good deal of what is called the decay of religion. Apart from that, is the present so very different from other ages of ‘the West’ from anywhere else?

It’s also worth doing well

I have very few fond memories of the time – decades ago – when I used to watch the 60 Minutes TV program. But one of them is (I think, it might possibly have been a different show) a segment on the Portsmouth Sinfonia, “the worst orchestra in the world.” Atlas Obscura has an article about it:

The original Sinfonia consisted of 13 members, mostly students who had little to no musical experience. The “scratch” orchestra was meant as a one-off joke, part of a larger collection of silly acts. And they didn’t win the contest. Still, their playful irreverence hit a nerve. Spurred on by an outpouring of enthusiasm for their initial performance, the Sinfonia continued to play, growing in size over the next several years. Their policy was that anyone, of any skill level, could join, with the exception being that skilled musicians could not join and simply play poorly on purpose. Another rule was that all members had to show up for practice.

For a while they attracted large crowds, and they even cut a couple albums. People (like me) were charmed by the blatant effrontery of the thing. It was a sort of an embodiment of Chesterton’s maxim, in his essay on amateurism, that “anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”

The concept is fun, but it seems to me there’s a serious side too. The pleasures of bad music, like other pleasures of the flesh, are fleeting. In the end, quality counts. There’s a difference between enthusiasm and virtuosity, and virtuosity has staying power. It’s worth preserving.

Which brings me to this link, from Legal Insurrection, about protests at very liberal Reed College, Portland, Oregon. A number of students are angry that the school’s Humanities 110 course, a core course in the freshman curriculum, concentrates on western civilization.

I’m gonna go ahead and say it. Western civilization is the best civilization the world has ever seen. The very anger of the course’s opponents is a symptom of their cognitive dissonance, a refusal to accept the evidence of history, science, and their own senses.

‘The Edge of the World,’ by Michael Pye

The Vikings are hailed as the first Europeans, at least by some French scholars, breaking cultural divisions as well as breaking heads, and made into a foundation myth for our flabby, neo-liberal Europe.

The moment somebody shared a link to this book on Facebook, I knew I had to get it. And I’m glad I did, though I have certain quibbles. Michael Pye’s The Edge of the World reminded me of that old BBC television series with James Burke, “Connections.” It follows a somewhat wandering road of causation from the 7th Century to the 16th Century, showing how innovations that began when the Frisians dug so much peat out of their homeland that they were forced to build dikes and canals to control flooding led to the development of North Sea trade. Trade meant developing the concepts of hard money and credit, which led to abstract mathematical thinking, which led (in part) to modern science.

Trade means choices, and choices mean freedom. In a non-dogmatic way, The Edge of the World is a vigorous defense of capitalism.

There were parts I didn’t care for. Pye falls into the old trap of condemning the monks for denouncing the Vikings, on the grounds that Christians did pretty much the same things. He doesn’t go so far as to suggest the Christians should have just embraced the Vikings and their religion, but I’m not sure what the point is. He makes what seem to me rather conventional comments on people’s “need” to define ourselves by identifying enemies, as if enemies haven’t been in abundant supply throughout history. I suspect he wouldn’t criticize Muslims in the same way for condemning Crusaders.

But all in all an excellent book, full of interesting information, and with a sweeping narrative line. I recommend it.